As an adult I have learned to form an outline or prioritized list in my mind to reach my goal. However, when I rely completely on my mind things are forgotten or a task that I should have started at the beginning ends up being put towards the end. Using the mind mapping software to help me formulate ideas for what I need to accomplish for the Flat Stanley project has really helped me see different directions that I could go with for the project and also helped me see the various tasks that I need to start on right away.

The reason that I like mind mapping more than creating an outline is that 1) not everybody is a logical, sequential learner and 2) it is easy to add information to when brainstorming as a class. Sometimes I feel that when doing a formal outline students get hung up on the finality of it. For me at least, seeing a map makes it easier to change or add to the plan of attack.

If you have a hard time seeing my mind map you can go to http://www.screencast.com/t/UVGhriatP to get a better view. This was the one problem that I had- getting a good picture up on my blog. Maybe I can learn from some other people when we are finished this week. I used FreeMind , http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page to make the graphic organizer. I just downloaded the trial. It is not as pretty as some of the other mind mapping products but I found it to be very user friendly. Something that is important to me. I did try out Head Case, too, and liked the way it looks, especially for high school or adult students use.

Everything I did in this activity was new to me. I think that once I saw the completed project that I created I understood how important and effective a tool like this could be in the classroom.

As I mentioned, the only thing that I did not enjoy was trying to get a good picture up onto my blog. I used the jing project http://jingproject.com/ , to take a screen shot of my mind map but when I went to put it on my blog it was too big. I tried several other routes but none of them seemed to work. I think that if I knew a little more about html and programming it would have been easy but I kept getting an error. I will keep trying!

I really would not do anything differently next time. Actually I am going to try it out again for another project to fine tune my new skills! If I only do it once I will probably forget in a few weeks. Please feel free to post helpful hints for me in the future. I enjoy POSITIVE feedback.